Living In Perhaps

by Julia Widdows

  Tom unravelled himself from his tartan blanket and sat crosslegged on the veranda, leaning his head back against one of the wooden uprights. I could see the line of his throat against the darkness of the garden behind him. His Adam's apple stuck out. It was a boy's throat, quite different from girls'. 'She's not coming back,' he said. He reached out a lazy hand and drew Tillie's tobacco tin towards him. 'Ba?' he said.

  'OK. Why not?' said Barbara.

  He rolled her a cigarette. His fingers moved confidently, expertly. I stared in fascination.

  'Your friend?' he said, meaning me. Not deigning to know my name, though I knew he knew it.

  'OK.' I reached out one hand, casual too, and Tom crouched nearer to me in the darkness, holding up a match. I discovered it was an intimate thing, having a cigarette lit for you. Tom's unsettling nearness. That expert hand almost cradling mine.

  'You're supposed to breathe in,' he said. Not very kindly.

  It was like smoking a hot, flaming worm. I thought I must have seared my throat. There was no taste to it except heat, and then smoke. I did my utmost not to cough, and then dragged some air into my lungs, and leaned my head forward, hair over my face, while the tears popped into my eyes. I heard Tom's quiet, snickering little laugh.

  Barbara climbed out of her bed and went indoors, coming back with the water bottle, which she passed around. She had filled it with lime cordial. My throat felt as if it had been ripped, and the cordial stung all the way down. She and Tom finished their cigarettes pensively, blowing out smoke into the cool darkness.

  And then Tillie was walking over the grass again, materializing out of the night, barefoot, rubbing the backs of her arms. She didn't climb up on to the veranda but stood on the bare earth beneath it and reached through the railing for her empty glass and her tobacco tin, and saying, 'Don't stay awake too long, my doves,' walked towards the back of the house.

  I thought I had found the ultimate happy family.

  Some time later, half asleep, I heard Patrick come back, his footsteps heavy, and at least two others with him, making no attempt to keep quiet. The front door banged shut, lights flared all over the downstairs. Someone went into the kitchen, opening cupboard doors and calling out. They settled in the front room, although the other lights stayed on. I could hear the voices, Patrick's, another man's, a woman's with a throaty laugh, and now and then a half-sentence loud and clear: 'Lucky if she wants to ...', 'Not if it was to save your life ...', 'Thinks he's bloody Cézanne!', 'I care, and then I don't care ...' I lay there, frowning in the darkness, frowning with the effort of making these patchwork phrases into something that meant something.

  Later, much later, just as the birds in the woods started singing, I woke to hear Tillie's voice high up like a roosting bird herself, shushing Mattie who was wailing and protesting over something. 'Nah – nah – nah!' his voice went on, thin and peevish. 'Oh, Mattie, Mattie, Mattie, my little Mattie,' she said, almost singing. Whether he shut up or whether I fell asleep again first I couldn't tell.

  Of course, I had to get up and out by eight o'clock, make my way over the dew-wet fields and right around to Fairwith Avenue, where I hung about behind the hedges until I saw my father's car come crawling along, and I jumped out at him from the driveway of number fifteen, waving enthusiastically, before he could do anything as silly as walk up to the white front door.

  23

  Mandy

  Roy Tiltyard had moved in with Bettina, into the flat above Charisse. Bettina continued to cut and curl hair all day long, and Roy did some work in a light industrial place out along the coast road. No one knew what. It seemed to me that men's work when they were out of the home was literally unmentionable. What was it that they did all day? There are no names for it that mean anything. Unless they did something specific, like Wally, who drove a van. There again, it seems clear, but it isn't specific enough. Drove what kind of a van, filled with what, and for whom? An ice-cream van, a delivery van, a removals van? And Eddy, in the Merchant Navy, and Tom Rose's father, dead at sea – what was it they were doing? Did they haul sails and wrestle with the helm, sit at a table with radio dials in front of them and headphones over their ears, or pace the bridge and give instructions down a tube? You only got a hint of these things from films. What men might be up to in the oh-so-important world of work.

  We all knew perfectly well what it was that women did. We could see them every day, indoors and out, scouring, scrubbing, plumping, patting, slopping and slicing. You had only to glance out of the nets to see Mrs Smith sweeping her front step and Mrs Jones hanging her Persil-white washing and Mrs Brown polishing her windows to a crystal sheen. You could see them from buses and trains doing much the same, or carrying string bags full of shopping or pushing babies in prams or waiting to collect their mixed infants at the school gate. Even those who worked (the other was not work, just housework) were clearly visible to the human eye: cutting hair, swabbing out the school lavs, sticking a needle in your arm and saying, 'This won't hurt,' or pressing the keys of cash registers in shops across the land. Even me, eventually, leaning on my counter-top at the dry cleaner's in the long stretches between customers. What I did was open for all to see, there was no mystery involved. Anyone could have done it. A trained dog could have done it. Though not the safety pins, I think.

  Patrick, who was productive enough – I knew what he did and I even saw some of the results – worked at home when he wasn't teaching, and yet it seemed like play. He could saw wood and stretch canvas and make sketches surrounded by the riot and noise of his children and family and friends. When he could bear them no longer he could shut himself away in the attic, with all the windows open and music playing loudly, and still get his work done. But the very same circumstances had stopped Tillie doing the same work, had stopped her for years.

  'She doesn't have time to do any painting,' Barbara explained to me.

  'I don't get enough time. Time to paint. Not proper time,' Tillie said to me, later the same day. She leaned over the table towards me, pushing aside half-full cups and damp tea towels. 'You see, Carolina, I only have little wedges, little potato chips of time, sliced off the whole big proper thing. It's not enough.'

  Which was bizarre in view of the fact that later I saw Tillie sitting on the back step in her usual position, chin on knees and arms around shins, doing nothing. Well, she was painting her toenails with Barbara's metallic blue nail varnish, and smoking a cigarette. She wasn't doing absolutely nothing. But in that household, in terms of inertia, it was as good as you were going to get.

  *

  I learned later that it was the kitchen Barbara was anxious for Tillie to paint. It was a dark and dirty pear-leaf green, had been all the time they lived there, according to Barbara, and she wanted it redecorated like the Van Hoogs' kitchen, fresh and yellow and glinting with light. She had even picked out a colour – 'Daffodil' – from a paint chart.

  'I'll get round to doing it some day,' Tillie promised gaily, picking up a basket of washing to peg out on the line. 'But I like my house. I love my house. I'm perfectly content with it as it is.'

  She paused in the back doorway, looking around. Her feet were bare and she wore terrible cut-off drainpipe jeans which made her look like Tom the Cabin Boy.

  'You wouldn't want it all tidy and prissy and clean,' she told Barbara, and then ran off down the wooden steps. We heard her call back over her shoulder: 'In those sort of houses you can't do as you like, and you always do as you like.'

  The Hennessys didn't have a scrap of wallpaper anywhere in their house, no cabbage roses, no twining ivy or limp bamboo. Their walls were painted, a plain backdrop to the pictures and the unmatched furniture. And I liked it, I found it restful. But I know what my mother would have said if she could have seen it: 'They should be ashamed of themselves. Chipped gloss paint, and finger marks everywhere. And I'd throw out that dreadful old junk they call furniture, if it was up to me. Not even antique. It's not as if they don't know any better. They know all right,
they're just the sort that don't care.'

  Bettina was a changed woman. She had always had a tendency towards plumpness, a generosity about the calves, a flapping of flesh on the upper arms. During her time as a fiancée she began to bulge, to melt and overflow, like warm ice cream squeezed between two wafers. Now that she was a married woman she inflated, a hot air balloon serenely wafting above the unimportant crowd. We all hoped, secretly, that Roy Tiltyard liked 'em big. He'd have to.

  Mandy remained small and thin. When she was twelve, Gloria said, 'She'll start growing soon. She'll flesh out.' A horrible image, to my mind. She didn't. She stayed like a small wizened unhappy doll, while her mother blossomed and billowed. But she grew quieter. She lost her bully's confidence. Perhaps she'd got to the stage where little-girl tricks didn't work any more, but hadn't yet lighted upon any other techniques to replace them.

  I had imagined that now Mandy was the child of two married parents there would be no reason for other people to cosset and spoil her. Surely she was no longer at a disadvantage? Everyone else had two parents, and had to put up with the situation, no excuses made. But the customers at Charisse still apparently saw her as a deserving case, a pathetic little mite, and when Bettina wasn't looking they buffed up already shining sixpences and shilling pieces and pushed them into her hand, muttering, 'Put that in your piggy bank, darlin',' or 'Get yourself some sweets,' as if her entire nourishment depended on them.

  Which set me to thinking that maybe there was something they knew that I didn't know about Roy Tiltyard. Or about marriage.

  I had my hair cut at Charisse now. I was able to observe these things. When I was little, Bettina had always cut my hair on one of her Saturday afternoon visits, making me perch on a kitchen chair with a box on it to raise me up to the right height. She brought her hairdressing scissors, and asked Mum for an old towel to drape over my shoulders. She damped my hair with water sprayed from a plastic squeezy bottle, mysteriously smelling of the hairdressing salon. And she and my mother would chat idly over my head, while I sat, as still as I could manage, trance-like, without even a mirror to gaze into. I could see why Mandy hadn't minded hanging round the salon. It was addictive stuff, even in the kind of enigma code they used because I was there.

  'Poor old Gloria ...'Bettina would start. 'That Eddy. Honestly.'

  'Poor Gloria,' my mother would intone. And so it went on, a steady slow game of throw and catch.

  'How she puts up with it.'

  'She's too ...'

  'That Eddy.'

  '... put upon.'

  'I know.'

  'All these years. You'd think—'

  'I know.'

  'I don't know.'

  'I wouldn't.'

  'Honestly.'

  'Catch me.'

  Like an iceberg, so much more unsaid than said.

  'How's Stell?' Bettina would ask.

  'She's all right.'

  'Haven't seen her in a while.'

  'She's well.'

  'New man?'

  'Nn-nn.'

  'Could do with one. That Wally.' Or that Gerald, that Dimitri. 'Wouldn't touch him with a bargepole, myself.'

  My mother would laugh. 'She needs to settle down.'

  'Suppose she can't afford to be choosy ...'

  'Find a nice man.'

  '... not at her age.'

  'Mmm.'

  Maybe they thought I couldn't hear, that being a child somehow sealed up my ears to adult conversation. I'm sure they believed it made my mind too slow to understand what they were on about. Which was usually their specialist subject: M-E-N.

  I wanted to grow my hair long, and my mother wanted me to have it short. The compromise was somewhere between the two. Bettina cut my fringe halfway down my forehead and halfway round my head, like a Plantagenet king. The rest of my hair she cut in a straight curtain an inch below my earlobes, too short to put into a ponytail but still needing to be tucked behind my ears. Between cuts I might get it long enough to go into two stubby bunches which stuck out like shaving brushes. I think she did it deliberately.

  But now I was older I went four times a year to Charisse. Bettina pronounced my hair difficult, holding up the end of a lock and letting it flop between her first two fingers, unimpressed. She cut it in a longer version of what I had had before. I was trying to grow out my fringe, but she always found the stray long bits and gathered them back in again, remorselessly chopping before I could say a word. I sat with my hands folded under the checked nylon bib that Ida Carr had wafted over me when I sat down, and watched silently as damp strands, longer than I could bear to part with, fell into my lap.

  The salon smelled of hair dye and perming solution and the hairspray they kept in great gold silos. Elnett. L'Oréal. Exotic words, full of promise, promise of transformation. Photos of glamorous women with shining swirls of glamorous hair stood on the counter and hung in the window. They dangled the promise that such a look could be achieved here. They tempted you to point to one and say, 'I'll have my hair like that,' but that seemed to imply you thought you already had a wonderful Hollywood face to match. And it was obvious that the soft halos of curls in the pictures were a stratosphere above the parched lawyers' wigs that emerged from under the dryers, to be pecked at with the pointed end of a tail-comb, and sprayed and jointly admired, front and back, and paid for and covered quickly with a chiffon scarf for preservation from the weather outside. So you just put up and shut up, and never mentioned that the haughty Hollywood faces might be out of place.

  I had always to go at a quiet time, when they could fit me in, so there were only ever one or two customers beneath the monstrous helmets of the dryers. They sat in their checked bibs, hands issuing out the sides to turn the pages of Woman's Realm, flicking through, hunting for the shocks and scandal of the problem page or the doctor's column. Or they did if they were anything like Barbara and me. Though Barbara was tougher with her advice than Evelyn Home or Peggy Says ... 'Pathetic cow,' was Barbara's response to some poor reader's misfortune, 'she should just dump him.' Or, more radically: 'Cut his balls off !' It was not a remedy I'd ever heard suggested for Eddy.

  The mirror in front of me reflected the bank of shell-pink dryers and just about everything else that went on in the salon. Ida Carr came round with the broom, taking away your hair before you could miss it. She wore navy velour slippers with stuck-on diamonds on the toes. Purple veins bulged over her insteps, snaked around her ankle bones and probably all the way up her calves, but these were hidden under a dingy black skirt and a pink overall, made of the same material as the salon's bibs. I wanted her to sit down and take the weight off her feet but she never did, always busy with the broom, or detaching curlers from boiled heads, or fetching the hand mirror so that customers could see the backs of their perms.

  Mandy was usually there, in those fallow after-school hours, sitting on one of the chairs where people waited. Sometimes there was another kid there too, a child or grandchild of one of the women under the dryers, and once there was a little dog, a Yorkshire terrier with its fringe in a tartan bow. Mandy never took any notice of them. She just sat there, knees drawn up and skirt pulled down over them, biting away at the skin beside her thumbnail. She didn't say anything, she didn't talk to me. Every so often Bettina might glance across, or not even bother to glance, and ask, 'Right, Mand?' as if to check that she was still breathing. Mandy would raise her eyebrows, or shrug her shoulders in response, a weary-of-the-world gesture, a seen-it-all and couldn't-care-less look.

  And then Ida Carr would get even busier with the broom, and customers would snap the clasps on their handbags and purses. They waited until Bettina was concentrating on putting the coins into the right sections of the till, or had drifted on to the occupant of the next dryer, testing the next set of rollers and tucking cotton wool round overheated ears. Then a swift hand would take Mandy's hand from round her knees, and put a coin in her palm, and tuck her fingers up over it, tightly, so as not to lose it. Would pat her bony shoulder or her sk
inny knee, and a newly scented head would whisper sweet nothings in her ear. Would smile, and bustle out.

  Mandy wasn't a little bastard any longer, and she obviously wasn't going to die of anything any time soon, so what was it that they were all worried about now?

  24

  Shopping: Two

  When I was thirteen my pocket money went up quite a bit. This was because I was a teenager now. In the past it had risen by three-pence, then sixpence, every year, which still didn't amount to much. Suddenly I was a whole two shillings better off. Brian wasn't pleased, even when it was explained to him that when he was thirteen the same rule would apply. He continued to moan every Friday night when the money was doled out, and every other time it occurred to him. Girls did not deserve to be preferred above boys, not for any reason – although he wasn't able to put it like that. And then he suddenly shut up about it. I have a horrible feeling that someone slipped him something – a lump sum – to keep him quiet. The old double standard, still alive and well.

  Now that Bettina had stopped visiting every Saturday afternoon, Brian and I no longer had to stick around to entertain Mandy, do the family duty. Saturdays became a great stretch of flexible time, an oasis of freedom between the obligations of school days and Sundays. Barbara and I took to going into town on a Saturday to wander round the shops. I actually felt the money burning a hole in my pocket, a lovely fiscal glow just where the coins sat. We usually walked all the way into town to save spending precious money on the bus fare; it took us about half an hour. Sometimes we went with Barbara's friend Gaynor, who got off the school bus with her, and sometimes we met up with another friend of theirs, a fair-haired girl called Jillian. My heart always sank when I heard that they were coming too, but I didn't have any choice in the matter.